Impact du COVID-19/coronavirus sur les prix de l'immobilier ?

Un article assez intéressant sur l’impact du coronavirus sur les foncières de commerce et plus, signé par The Economist :

The Economist a écrit :

Is investors’ love affair with commercial property ending?

After covid-19, the investment world will become more discriminating
Finance & economics
Jun 25th 2020 edition

THE SECOND week of March was a heartbreaking one for Will Beckett. The boss of Hawksmoor, a chain of steakhouses that employs 700 workers in Britain, had been days away from opening his first New York outpost. Instead government-imposed lockdowns forced him to close all his restaurants down. The City types that usually queue for its sizzling cuts were forced to go without. So too were Mr Beckett’s landlords, after he told them he could not afford to pay rent for the second quarter. Most of his peers, he says, have also yet to square the bill. Restaurateurs are likely to miss their payments for the third quarter too.

Activity is gradually restarting. On June 23rd Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, said he would allow restaurants to re-open on July 4th. A moratorium on repossessions, introduced in March, has been extended to September. Yet social distancing and warier, cash-strapped diners will squeeze eateries’ margins. Jonathan Downey, who runs street-food markets in London, says the hospitality industry risks “rent apocalypse”.

Most people probably have more sympathy for chefs and waiters than for landlords. But many do not realise that payments made to commercial landlords are increasingly channelled towards their own pension pots or insurance claims. The global stock of investible commercial property—hotels, shops, offices and warehouses—has quadrupled since 2000, to $32trn (see chart 1). More than a third is owned by institutional investors, which piled in, lured by lucrative, solid returns.

Covid-19 has upended the impression of solidity. Most immediately, it has severely impaired tenants’ ability to pay rent. It also raises questions about where shopping, work or leisure will happen once the crisis abates. Both are likely to prompt investors to become more discriminating. Some institutions may shift their funds away from riskier properties; other investors, meanwhile, might hunt for bargains, or seek to repurpose unfashionable stock.

The infatuation with commercial property began in earnest after the global financial crisis of 2007-09. Interest rates were cut to almost zero across much of the rich world, making it harder to generate the safe cash flows that pension funds and insurers need to meet future liabilities. “Core” property—often in desirable places and needing little refurbishment—typically produced secure annual returns in the high single digits to low teens, mostly in the form of contractual, often inflation-adjusted, rent payments (see chart 2). Buying property allows investors to park vast sums of money—from tens of millions to billions of dollars—which they can forget about for years (commercial leases often last a decade or more). And the returns have been less volatile in crises than those from public equities and commodities.

As a result both the numbers of institutional investors buying up property and the amounts they have allocated to it have risen since 2010 (see chart 3). A chunk is channelled through private property funds, which have raised $1.6trn since 2008, according to Private Equity Real Estate, a publication. All together, institutions hold about $6trn worth of assets privately, and $5trn through listed vehicles. Property is typically financed by helpings of debt, which accounts for just under half of the market’s value in America.

Investors’ appetite has been met by a growing supply of assets. Since 2000, businesses ranging from burger chains to banks have spun out trillions of dollars of property they used to own to free up cash, often leasing it back immediately after divesting. Worldwide, offices and shops account for 61% of assets, though the share of commercial housing (ie, student housing and condominiums) and logistics assets has been rising.
Shop till you drop

By the start of this year there were signs of froth. Both offices and industrial properties (warehouses, chiefly) reached record prices at the turn of 2020. Retail-property prices had already peaked in 2018. Rent growth, however, had started to level off across most sectors. All this depressed yields, and returns had started to flag.

Then the pandemic hit. As investors panicked, stockmarkets tumbled and property markets froze. Transaction volumes in May were down by about a third in the West and two-fifths in Asia, according to Real Capital Analytics, a data firm. The proportion of offers that fell through before completion doubled in Europe and rose sevenfold in America. Indices tracking listed trusts that invest in commercial property (dubbed REITs) cratered in March. Part of that might have reflected an indiscriminate sell-off of shares by investors rather than an ebbing taste for property. But benchmarks have recovered only about half their losses.

Covid-19 jolts investors out of their complacency in two ways. First, swarms of tenants have simply stopped paying rent as the economy has reeled; the extent to which losses will persist is especially uncertain. Second, it may speed up long-term shifts within the sector: from shops, say, towards warehouses. Some types of property could become less bankable.

Start with delinquency. As lockdowns shuttered shops and businesses, rent collections collapsed. Less than half of all tenants in Britain paid rent on time at the end of March; a quarter of it was still due seven weeks later, says Remit Consulting, a research firm. Hotels have been worst hit: with borders closed and travel restricted, average occupancy fell from 70% before the pandemic to a low of 15% in early April. In America, average revenue per room shrank by 84%, to $16 per night, in April. Stand-alone shops and shopping malls have also suffered. Collection rates have fallen below 50% on both sides of the Atlantic.

Offices have proved sturdier. Firms that rent out co-working spaces on short-term leases have suffered. Other tenants, bound by decades-long leases, have continued to pay. Still, collection rates range between 57% in Britain and 90% in America. Late or missed rent payments in the double digits are hardly normal.

The resulting lost rental income is likely to have passed through to missed mortgage payments. Many banks report losses with a lag and with limited detail, but delinquency rates on commercial-mortgage-backed securities (CMBS)—bundles of loans sold on capital markets—provide a barometer. In America this month they exceeded levels seen during the financial crisis (see chart 4). A fifth of debt payments on shopping properties are late; a quarter of those due on “lodgings”—including student housing, vacant since universities closed—have also been skipped.

As activity resumes, properties are adapting, at some capital expense. Hotels are implementing contactless check-in, automatic doors and new cleaning routines. Offices are introducing temperature checks and reducing pinch points at lifts. Brian Kingston, who runs the property arm of Brookfield, a private-equity firm, says it is reorganising mall layouts and car parks to make kerbside pickup easier.

But fresh outbreaks, or lingering fears of infection, could throttle the return to normality. Cash-poor and fearful, companies may limit business travel. Households may shun far-flung holidays and perhaps even shopping trips at home. That is bad news for hotels, restaurants and shops. Erin Stafford of DBRS Morningstar, a rating agency, reckons that, short of a fast recovery, half of America’s independent restaurants may go under.

Such effects will be compounded as the vast support provided by governments is rolled back. Since March the authorities have propped up commercial tenants by paying employees’ wages, topping up business cash reserves, legislating against eviction, backstopping banks and reducing credit constraints. Most measures are set to expire within months. Coface, a trade-credit insurer, expects insolvencies to jump by a third worldwide by 2021. Landlords could find that rental income dries up just as lenders, tolerant thus far, lose patience. Without progress on a vaccine or a treatment over the next three to six months, says Michael Van Konynenburg of Eastdil Secured, a bank, “we’ll start to see more enforcement actions”.
Bricks and mortal

Further ahead, covid-19 will also make some types of commercial property less of a safe bet than others, by accelerating trends that were visible even before the coronavirus began to spread. The most obvious is the rise of online shopping. Since February the rich world has seen a surge in e-commerce activity. Many shoppers may choose to stick with the speed and convenience of click-and-deliver. In 2019 a record 9,300 bricks-and-mortar stores closed in America; Coresight Research, a data firm, says 15,000 could fold this year. JCPenney, a century-old department-store chain, went bust last month.

Shopping malls, particularly those in the sticks, could be in trouble. On top of the reduced rent caused by shop closures, the vacating of department stores, which often act as “anchor” tenants, may give other stores the right to pay lower rents, or even to cancel lease agreements, says Aditya Sanghvi of McKinsey, a consultancy. A third of America’s 1,100 malls could end up being demolished. On June 23rd Intu, which owns shopping centres in Britain, appointed administrators.

The pandemic’s effect on office space is less clear. Many workers may find that they quite like working from their bedrooms or kitchens. Others say they miss the camaraderie of the office. Social distancing may also force firms to spread out more, reversing a trend that saw office space per employee fall by half in a decade. If the net effect were a reduction in rented space, it could cause havoc. Victor Calanog of Moody’s, a rating agency, calculates that if tenants in New York gave up even 10% of their space over the next five years, it could result in a halving of rents sought on vacant properties.

Meanwhile, the shift to remote shopping and working presents investment opportunities. Storage and distribution facilities remain geared towards industrial use rather than pick-and-pack. Brian Chinappi of Actis, a London-based private-equity firm, says the crisis has made it even hungrier for data centres, which it is now building in Asia and Africa.
The writing on the wall

Assessing the extent of potential losses from the crisis is hard. Britain’s financial watchdog thinks uncertainty on values is so strong that it has forced listed funds to suspend redemptions. Analysts canvassed by The Economist reckon property values will fall by less than 20% overall this year, and rents by 5-10%. That compares with falls of 25% and 10-20%, respectively, in 2008-09. But a lot depends on how long rent suspensions last. MSCI, an index provider, estimates that assets subject to a six-month rent holiday and a recession could lose 37% of their worth. REIT prices suggest retail properties could have further to fall.
Booking losses

Figuring out who will bear those losses is even tricker. Laws differ as to whether creditors or equity holders should get preferred treatment, with the former favoured in Europe and the latter better protected in America. Most important, ownership of property assets is “a big, complicated web” that cannot easily be untangled by outsiders, says a consultant. Property vehicles are often owned by large asset managers that aggregate pension-fund money from all over the world. Despite improvements in disclosures, private funds remain opaque. Lenders are not always best-in-class either. “Try getting a French bank to reveal its property-type breakdown for commercial real-estate lending,” says one analyst.

What seems clear is that banks are in a sounder position than during the financial crisis. Loan-to-value ratios were below 60% at the end of 2019, compared with 70% in 2007, so there is more equity to absorb drops in values, says Richard Bloxam of JLL, a property consultancy. Banks’ capital buffers are bigger. In America CMBSs can catalyse credit crunches, because property lenders often use them as collateral to finance more loans. But these account for 15% of total property debt, down from over 50% in 2007. And they have held up well so far, thanks to purchases by the Federal Reserve. (The Fed’s programme, which excludes newly issued CMBSs, expires on September 30th.)

A more diverse lending universe, though, means more entities are exposed to potential losses—including institutional investors, which have piled $235bn into specialist private property-debt funds since 2008. Some funds are already struggling to repay the short-term debt they have raised against long-dated assets. Bigger shocks may well occur when batches of loans mature. Britain faces a £43bn ($53bn) commercial-property refinancing wall in 2020-21; America’s is worth $2trn over the next five years.

Such losses notwithstanding, investors’ love affair with commercial property is unlikely to be at an end. Interest rates in the rich world are close to zero, if not below it, and going nowhere. The spread between real-estate and government-bond yields is still alluring. Private-equity firms’ mountains of dry powder—now worth a third of assets under management, the highest since 2010—will put a floor under values. But those who once blindly piled in are likely to think twice. The result could be a more discerning investment approach. Institutional investors could become more cautious, favouring targets like housing blocks or prime offices that provide long-term secure income; more money seems to be chasing a shrinking pool of “defensive” assets, which could push prices up further and dampen yields. Some will hedge their bets. Alisa Mall of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a $3.5bn endowment with a 10.5% allocation to property, says it wants to add generalist managers who can invest across sectors and geographies to its portfolio of “sharpshooter” specialists.

Yet others, mostly private real-estate funds, hope to swoop on bargains (most public vehicles are trading below their underlying asset values). Craig Duffy of GLP, a private-equity firm based in Singapore with a vast portfolio of warehouses, says the firm has $7bn of dry powder to deploy, and hopes to raise another $8bn-9bn by the end of 2020. Some will focus on debt at a time when liquidity to stretched borrowers comes at a premium: Skardon Baker of Apollo, a firm that invests in distressed assets, says its European opportunistic fund has deployed €500m in the past 12 weeks.

The big winners will probably be giant firms like Brookfield, which closed a $15bn fund last year, and Blackstone, which raised a record $20.5bn vehicle a few months later. They have war-chests allowing them to command price discounts by buying bundles of assets at once. And they are among the few firms with the development skills needed to turn buildings round. Ever greater demand for their services may allow them to charge hefty fees, on ever bigger sums. Pension funds and insurers are becoming warier of commercial property. But for private-equity barons it remains a giant moneymaker.

Pour contribuer aux retours d’expériences (et les confirmer) : ma compagne a mis en vente la veille du dé-confinement son appartement (résidence des années 80, dernier étage, expo SUD et balcon de 12m2). Dans la semaine suivante, après une dizaine de visites, une offre avec paiement cash était acceptée à un prix élevé (3000€/m2) pour cette agglo.

Contactés par des agents immobiliers, ils ont tous parlé également d’un reprise frénétique (!).

Sans doute beaucoup de gens impatients et/ou frustrés par le confinement, désireux de faire aboutir leur projet ; peut-être aussi de gens pressés de sécuriser leurs fonds dans la pierre… Je crois que la véritable tendance s’observera d’ici la fin de l’année, voire même plutôt l’année prochaine.

Bonjour Ernest,
D’où tenez-vous l’information selon laquelle les services de publicité foncière auraient jusqu’à 15 mois de retard (ce qui impliquerait que nous ne pourrions pas avoir de vision claire du marché immobilier actuel avant fin 2021)?
Cdt

Retour experience sur secteur triangle d’or alpilles luberon : reprise très vigoureuse sur marché immo habitation résidences secondaires dans la gamme 500 000 à 1,4 m€. Les acheteurs ne sont pas des locaux ( comme très souvent dans cette gamme de prix).
On a un peu l’impression que le confinement exacerbe les tendances de fonds préexistantes. Les milliards déversés par les banques centrales ne sont peut être pas étrangers à cette volonté de détenir des actifs tangibles.

Retour d’expérience sur le terrain d’une mise en vente d’un petit immeuble dans une ville moyenne (petite préfecture) ne connaissant pas de tension sur le marché immobilier (prix stables sur les 5 dernières années).

C’est la folie ! La difficulté est de réussir à répondre aux demandes de visites (planning rapidement saturé en ne faisant visiter que les gens qui paient cash ou ont étudié le financement avec leur banque), gérer les acheteurs qui veulent faire des offres sans même avoir vu le bien et la succession des sur-offres lors des visites.

J’ai vendu 3 biens dans la même ville en 2019, si la demande était là (biens attractifs à rentabilité correcte) l’ambiance était bien moins en faveur des vendeurs.

Cela durera t-il ?

Range19,

Je vous rejoins. Visite d’un appartement dans une ville de province sinistrée avec une rentabilité brut de à peine 10% et bien, il sait vendu au prix en 24h…

Et ce genre d’annonce avec des biens à 10% brut ne sort pas tout les jours…

Moi, sur ce genre d’investissement (appartement avec charges) , je veux du 10% brut en intégrant les frais de notaire mais en ce moment ça passe pas….

Et pour ce qui est des grandes métropoles, j’ai pas l’impression que les prix baissent….

Idem, à la recherche d’un premier investissement immobilier et après quelques visites et retours d’agents, le marché de l’immo locatif est reparti à pleine bourre. Pas plus tard qu’hier un agent me confiait qu’il subissait le marché. Je suis pourtant dans une préfecture où le marché est normalement assez raisonnable.

Bonjour à tous, pour apporter ma pierre à l’édifice, je viens de signer le compromis de vente de ma maison dans le fond du 77, vendu au prix affiché.
je l’ai vendu 12% plus cher qu’acheté il y a 3 ans et légèrement supérieur à l’évaluation la plus haute des agences immo.

le marché est très vigoureux. A voir si ça sera le cas en Novembre…

D’après la chambre des notaires du Grand Paris, la crise de la Covid19 aurait bouleversé (au moins ponctuellement) les prix de l’immobilier en Ile de France.
Pour le première fois depuis 2007 les prix en banlieue sont en plus grande augmentation que ceux de Paris intra-muros. Ils expliquent le phénomène par la recherche de "vert" et celle plus grande de maisons que d’appartements.
Les flambées de prix sont spectaculaires dans certains coins comme à Colombes +18.1% ou 21.2% à Sartrouville (chiffres à fin juin).

La matérialisation des ventes en cours devrait donner en octobre une hausse des prix sur un an de + 6.6% à Paris (10860/m2) +9% en petite couronne (idem maison et appartements) et en grande couronne +6.1% pour les appartement et +7.6% pour les maisons.

L’attrait de la petite couronne est dopé par des Parisiens qui vendent leurs appartements pour vivre dans plus d’espace et de vert, en grande banlieue il y a le même phénomène + celui de nouvelles résidences secondaires de Parisiens.

D’après les notaires la barrière du périphérique est en cours d’atténuation. La tendance observée depuis le déconfinement devrait, toujours d’après les notaires, se poursuivre et la petite banlieue devenir la locomotive de l’immobilier francilien. .



Source : Les Echos

Bonsoir,

dans mon message N°158 j’avançais 5 pistes pouvant conduire à une chute des prix de l’immobilier.

DrMinimal, le 21/04/2020 a écrit :

- 1) augmentation importante et durable du chômage (…)

- 2) augmentation des taux d’intérêts des crédits immobiliers (…)

- 3) fermeture du robinet des crédits (…)

- 4) effondrement de la demande locative touristique (…)

- 5) fiscalité (…)

Je constate que les hypothèses 3 et 4 se réalisent : les affaires juteuses qui disparaissaient dans la journée il y a quelques mois disparaissent toujours vite, mais moins vite. Si elles sont publiées sur Leboncoin on a une journée pour contacter le vendeur ou l’agent, contre une demi journée max il y a quelques mois avant que le vendeur supprime l’annonce, harcelé par une horde d’investisseurs affamés.

De même, je vois un afflux énorme d’ex-Airbnb : ce sont tous ces studios ou T2 à la décoration impeccable digne d’un catalogue, murs bleu-canard, cadres "Welcome home" Maisons du Monde aux murs, canapé turquoise neuf avec un plaid jaune poussin…
Il y a une épuration énorme des "appartements airbnb". Ces annonces ne s’écoulent pas vite malgré des prix "au marché" si l’on considère le marché pré-COVID !

Il y a donc bien sur mes marchés une baisse mesurable (que je mesure au doigt mouillé) des prix de l’immobilier, en tout cas pour les biens type meublé de tourisme, et une baisse de concurrence sur les biens type "marchand" et belles affaires qui partent toujours au prix, mais moins vite.

Je touche toujours du bois pour que 1) ne se réalise pas.

Bien à vous,

Dr. Minimal

Comme toujours en immobilier, s’il y a une tendance générale, il y a plusieurs marchés, à plusieurs vitesses.
Pour ma part je constate un rattrapage de la crise de 2008 dans certaines régions touchées par le marché de la résidence secondaire. On retrouve certains acheteurs prêts à casser la tirelire pour un havre de paix dans lequel ils pourraient se confiner au cas où.
A côté de cela certains bien en piteux état restent sur le carreau, les investisseurs ayant déserté.

DrMinimal je crains que nous soyons en train d’assister à 1) sans que l’on ne puisse y faire grand chose.
Ca n’empêche pas certaines personnes de rediriger leur épargne (AV, PEA) vers un bien immobilier dont ils auront l’impression de profiter immédiatement, de la même manière que d’autres préféreront s’offrir un camping-car, ces investissements étant biens plus concrets qu’une ligne sur un relevé.

Iqce il faudra juger sur les chiffres du nombre de divorces annuels, si certains "auraient dû avoir lieu dans 2-3 ans", ça se calmera par la suite et les choses rentreront dans l’ordre. Un couple qui divorce en raison du confinement aurait en effet très probablement fini par divorcer.

Je partage ici une interview récente de Pierre Sabatier sur sicavonline, claire et sans langue de bois, qui fait un tour d’horizon de l’évolution des prix de l’immobilier depuis l’épidémie de Covid, en direct et via les différents véhicules d’investissement.

Le sujet est vaste et, comme disait Surin plus haut, on voit bien qu’il n’y a pas UN marché immobilier mais plusieurs et que tous ne sont pas logés à la même enseigne.